


things are okay as long as i'm with you (Nyctophobia)

by pechebaie



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, OCD Semi (if you squint), fear of the dark, this was a writing prompt from twitter but it turned into projection. L.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-03
Updated: 2020-02-03
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:28:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22544788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pechebaie/pseuds/pechebaie
Summary: Semi wasn’t always afraid of the dark.
Relationships: Semi Eita/Tendou Satori
Comments: 3
Kudos: 137





	things are okay as long as i'm with you (Nyctophobia)

Eita wasn’t always afraid of the dark.

He remembers when he was little, when he had a less-controlled mild obsession with cats, he would turn the lights off in his bedroom and pretend that he could see in the dark. There were nights, even, where his room wasn’t dark enough, and he would build a nest of pillows and blankets on the floor of his closet and sleep in there.

Nowadays he’s far too big to sleep in a closet, and far too anxious to sleep in the dark.

He doesn’t know when he went from loving the dark to being afraid of imaginary things lurking in it, he just knows that it happened. Sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night to the pitch dark of his room and has to bury himself beneath his blankets, frozen stiff and terrified of something he knows doesn’t even exist.

It usually helps when someone else is in the room. If he’s at home and wakes up to the dark, his night light having died in the middle of the night, but he can feel his cat at the foot of his bed, then he’s fine. There’s no sense of panic, not fear of  _ something _ looming in the shadows.

Usually it helps. Sometimes it doesn’t.

At school, particularly, it doesn’t help. It’s not that sharing a dorm room with Tendou makes Eita’s fear of the dark  _ worse _ , per se, it’s just that it doesn’t make it any easier.

They’ve shared a room for the past two years, opting to room together in their second year after they became such good friends through volleyball. Eita’s never talked to Tendou about his stupid, irrational fear of the dark, though, so he just curls up when the lights go out and squeezes his eyes shut and hopes he can fall asleep quickly.

He doesn’t think that Tendou would make fun of him for being afraid, he just worries. There’s something about this fear that feels too childish, and perhaps a touch too personal, to share with someone. It feels stupid, and Eita often mentally beats himself up for it, but he can’t change how he feels.

Still. Waking up at two in the morning to suffocating darkness is not how he likes to spend his nights.

He can hear Tendou’s rhythmic breathing on the other side of the room, but it’s not the comfort it should be. Eita fists his hands in his sheets and keeps his eyes clenched shut and hopes that when he opens them again, it’ll be light out.

It isn’t, of course, because he can’t keep his eyes shut and his mind blank for four hours straight. It’s not like his mind will let him relax, either, so he ends up staring into the darkness. His mind, in turn, starts making shapes out of nothing. He blinks and they’re gone, but they were there, he’s  _ sure _ of it-

He thinks there’s something lunging, so Eita buries his face in his blanket and whimpers.

He holds his breath. If he doesn’t breathe,  _ it _ won’t know he’s here. Eita doesn’t know exactly what  _ it _ is, but every time there’s something in the dark,  _ it _ is always the same, and every time he gets scared of  _ it _ in the dark, he falls back on these rules: if he’s covered by his blankets,  _ it _ can’t sense him; if he doesn’t breathe,  _ it _ can’t hear him; if he closes his eyes,  _ it _ can’t see him.

So he closes his eyes and holds his breath and stays with his head under his blankets and hopes that he falls back to sleep soon so that he doesn’t have to face  _ it _ .

Something touches the top of Eita’s head and he almost screams.

“Semi?”

It’s Tendou. Eita doesn’t come out from under the blankets.

“Are you awake?”

“Yes,” Eita whispers back but it’s more of a hiss.

“You okay?”

“No,” Eita snaps. He burrows further into the blankets. His heart is pounding so hard that all he can hear is the blood in his ears.

There’s silence, and Eita thinks maybe Tendou’s gone back to bed before he feels Tendou’s hand on his arm through the blankets.

“Can I help?” Tendou asks.

Eita shrugs, then realises Tendou probably has no idea what he’s doing because he’s covered in blankets, and says, “I don’t know.”

Tendou sits on the bed. “You wanna talk about it?”

“No,” Eita says. They’re both still whispering, and it’s unnecessary considering the walls here are fairly thick and Eita knows for a fact that the guys in the next room over are notoriously heavy sleepers, but he really doesn’t want to be the one to break the moment. It’s not allowed. “I don’t know. I don’t like the dark.”

“Oh,” Tendou says. “Can I come in?”

Eita frowns. “Come in to  _ what _ ?”

“Your cocoon.”

Instead of answering, Eita lifts the edge of the blankets. An invitation.

Tendou crawls beneath the blankets with him, and sometimes Eita’s surprised how well the two of them fit in these small beds. (It shouldn’t be surprising, really, considering how well they always fit together, all their curves and grooves aligned.)

Tendou snuggles up to him and puts his chin on Eita’s shoulder. “Hi.”

Eita turns his head just enough so that the side of his nose barely brushes the side of Tendou’s. “Hi…”

“I was scared of the dark when I was little,” Tendou says. (Of course Tendou gets what’s going on straight away. He’s the most perceptive person Eita’s ever met, even if he plays it all off on intuition.) He lays an arm over Eita’s stomach; it’s warm. “I thought there were monsters and they were gonna eat me.”

Eita scowls. That’s how he feels  _ now _ , but it sounds so childish and obviously-fake when someone says it out loud. “Maybe they  _ are _ gonna eat me.”

“Na.” Tendou snuggles closer, which Eita didn’t know was even possible, and peppers kisses on his neck. “I’ll keep ‘em away.”

Eita snorts. “Sure.”

“They’ll see me and get so scared they won’t even think about eating you ever again.”

“Okay.” Tendou’s face is pressed in the crook of Eita’s neck, his arm is around his waist, and Eita’s starting to feel really very tired. “Yeah…”

“If you want, I can find my old night light,” Tendou says then, more serious. “It’s a cat and it has a white setting, and another that changes colours.”

“Mmm… You wouldn’t mind?”

“I slept through Hayato’s alarms at camp back in first year, I think I can handle a night light, Eita,” Tendou says.

“Those fucking alarms… 3 in the morning. What was that even  _ for _ ?”

Tendou doesn’t answer that. “I’ll look for the light next weekend when I’m home.”

“‘Kay.” Then, “...Can I sleep with you until then?”

“You don’t have to ask, Semisemi.”

Eita rolls over so that he’s facing Tendou then, their foreheads barely brushing. “Okay,” he says. “...Thank you.”

Tendou kisses his nose.

**Author's Note:**

> this stemmed from a writing prompt of 'comfort + darkness' from my friend @quaraniir on twitter. it was a fun writing exercise but i think i got too introspective with it KFNSKGJN
> 
> feel free to hmu on Twitter @pechebaie to talk abt HQ!! or give me writing prompts if you want!


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